Yesterday PubNative, the first API-based publisher platform 100% focused on native ads, announced that it had raised a 7-digit seed-funding figure from AppLift. We would like to take this opportunity to explain the reasons behind this investment, as well as how it is going to benefit AppLift’s existing clients and partners.

First of all, we are very excited about this mobile ad-tech company as it approaches native advertising in a groundbreakingly different way. Over the past few months, the mobile advertising market has shown a clear shift towards native advertising. From the very early stages we considered this trend to be a great thing for advertisers, publishers, and users alike. However, in spite of all the positive initiatives springing up across the industry, we saw that native advertising was quickly moving towards becoming a new standard ad format (mainly, the Facebook-style in-feed format). This speaks against the very idea of native advertising, where every publisher should be able to create non-standard ad-units fully customized to their user interface and user experience.

PubNative solves this problem. Its innovative technology allows publishers to request over 20 advertising assets to serve as building blocks to create any number of combinations for genuinely native and unique ad units, thereby achieving a completely seamless user experience. These building blocks include, among others, app name, icon, screenshots and rating, as well as custom images, image sizes and description texts available in over 10 languages.

There’s more, too. Publishers are able to achieve all of this via a simple API, client- or server side. Thus there is no need to integrate any SDK with PubNative:

We would like to emphasize the fact that the idea behind PubNative was born out of AppLift’s practice, understanding and vision of the mobile advertising market. It was co-founded by Ionut Ciobotaru, who was previously AppLift’s Head of Product, and some of the other core team members are also former AppLift employees. For us at AppLift, PubNative was an excellent opportunity to invest excess cash into an already-proven team and a visionary product for truly native advertising.

How will this investment impact AppLift’s current partners?

For our advertisers: All our advertising offers are directly plugged into the PubNative Exchange, which means all our gaming clients will benefit from a new source of top-quality traffic that will present your games in the most user-friendly way and deliver engaged users.

For our media partners: You can now take advantage of PubNative’s full flexibility to integrate native advertising into your app through an API, on top of your current AppLift integrations. PubNative will provide you with a comprehensive suite for monetizing your inventory via native ads, such as a proprietary eCPM optimization algorithm and black- and whitelisting functionalities. Additionally, PubNative also offers demand from non-gaming verticals by connecting to a wide array of ad networks.

If you are interested in benefiting from working with PubNative or would like more information, please get in touch with your AppLift account manager.

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